Tag Archives: oof

I was recently asked about a user reporting problems accessing their Out of Office and Shared Outlook Calendars when accessing Outlook from a Non-Domain Computer. Additionally the user was not able to create an Autodiscover record on the DNS for their public Domain.

However when the computer is in a WORKGROUP and the email domains FQDN cannot be resolved from the Internet then Outlook will be unable to connect to Autodiscover. In order to address this a local Autodiscover.xml file will need to be created and referenced on the local computer.

A local Autodiscover.xml file needs to be created, a sample of which can be found below. This files needs to be copied to a location which the PC can access, if no network share is available then copy the file to a folder on your C drive, and share that folder as hidden share.

Now, launch Microsoft Outlook and test OOF and Calendars. If this fails – Press the CTRL key and right click the Outlook icon in Task Bar and select Test Auto Configuration. Enter the email address, password details, untick Use Guesssmart and click Test. This should detail any issues with the Autodiscover.